Filmmakers

Allie Light (1935–2025) was an Academy Award–winning documentary filmmaker, writer, poet, and educator whose work often explored women’s lives, creativity, and personal experience. She died on September 17, 2025, at the age of 90.

Light studied at San Francisco State University, where she earned undergraduate and master’s degrees and later taught women’s studies. In 1974 she married filmmaker Irving Saraf, beginning a creative partnership that lasted nearly four decades and produced 18 documentaries. Their In the Shadow of the Stars won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1992, and Dialogues with Madwomen received the Sundance Freedom of Expression Award and a National Emmy.

After Saraf’s death in 2012, Light continued making films. In her eighties she made her first narrative film, Any Wednesday, and shortly before her 90th birthday completed The Ship That Turned Back, a tribute to Saraf recounting his childhood escape from Poland and the Nazis. Light leaves a substantial body of work created both independently and in collaboration with Saraf, including films now preserved and presented on Folkstreams.